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At the Kinney Center, Shakespeare and Mass Incarceration asks: Why is Shakespeare so often found in prisons? His plays frequently appear in prison libraries, arts programs, and higher education classrooms. This is, in part, because of the plays’ cultural prestige, but it is also because they invite readers to consider the relationship between justice and mercy, the nature of revenge, and the reasons a virtuous person might be driven to violent acts. In Shakespeare’s lifetime, he would have encountered a variety of prisons—debtor’s prisons, houses of correction, and the Tower of London. Imprisonment, forced labor, and corporal punishment are central themes in his plays. This exhibit traces the entanglements between Shakespeare and prisons across time, placing the plays in conversations with writing from within and about Massachusetts prisons.
in Collaboration with Kinney Center Director, Marjorie Rubright
1. Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1623) pivots on legal questions about sex. The play opens with Lord Angelo being granted temporary rule over Vienna, Italy. His first order of business is the strict enforcement of the city’s archaic law against fornication. A young man, Claudio, is arrested and swiftly sentenced to death for impregnating his girlfriend, Juliet. As friends and family advocate for Claudio’s release, the play explores issues of justice, discipline, and punishment.
2. This text highlights the historical relationship between incarceration and forced labor for the state. Instruction manuals like The Compleat Constable (1700) offer insight into what constituted a crime in the early modern period and the related forms of punishment. On this page, we see the prescribed punishment for rogues and vagabonds (early modern terms for unhoused people, thieves, and prostitutes), which included being whipped, deported, or “conveyed to the house of correction” where they could be forcibly “imployed in work.” People held at the “house of correction” were not paid for their labor in 1700, but neither are people incarcerated today in Arkansas, Georgia, and Texas. Incarcerated people in Massachusetts typically make between $5 and $35 per week and have little choice in whether they labor in prison.
3. In the early 20th century in Massachusetts, superintendent Howard Belding Gill proposed building a “model community prison” in Norfolk, Massachusetts that would represent a radical approach to dealing with punishment. Built by incarcerated men, Norfolk prison opened in 1932, promising “community within a wall.” But opponents decried the experiment as a “country club” that coddled prisoners. Written by Thomas O’Connor, one of Gill’s supporters, this manuscript, “Norfolk Prison” (1934) was intended for publication in The Survey, a New York magazine that tackled social and political issues. However, the essay was so controversial that it was rejected for publication.
4. The architecture of prisons was at the forefront of Howard Belding Gill’s vision for alternative models of incarceration. His prison featured dormitories rather than cell blocks. Each dormitory housed 50 men and 2 officers who were supposed to act like social workers rather than prison guards. Each room featured an unbarred window to provide fresh air and natural light, and community was fostered by way of meals in the shared dining room, visible in these photographs of Norfolk Prison (1934). 90 years later, debates about models of incarceration continue. California Governor, Gavin Newsom, recently announced that by 2025 the entirety of San Quentin Prison will shift to what is known as a “Scandinavian model” of imprisonment. This model prioritizes making life as normal as possible for people while they serve their sentence, viewing the loss of liberty and forced separation from family and community as the main punishment.
5. In a writing course inside Norfolk prison, Joseph T. Mealy, an incarcerated student, writes about prison programs. In this writing exercise (1973), he argues that “prison programs fail to meet the inmates’ real needs.” While the first paragraph supports this argument by citing administrative incompetence and an unstable environment as the source of the problem, the second paragraph offers a different contention. Mealy states that it is the kind of courses on offer that fail to meet the needs of students inside. Debates about curriculum for higher education in prison programs continue into the present day as incarcerated students question the relevance of canonical authors (such as Shakespeare) to their own experiences.
6. Incarcerated scholar, Gary E. Mosso, writes from Norfolk Prison to defend higher education programs in his essay, “The Truth About Prison Education” (1996). In this essay, Mosso quotes Senator Clairborne Pell, founder of the Federal Pell Grant, awarded to students who demonstrate exceptional financial need. Although incarcerated students qualified for this grant since its inception in 1973, their eligibility was revoked in 1994 when Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. This made higher education unattainable for many people in federal or state prisons. Pell eligibility was only recently reinstated for incarcerated students in July 2023.
7. What do Shakespeare courses inside prisons look like? This Beacon College Project Description (1980) for a 16th Century Literature/ Shakespeare course outlines course goals for one incarcerated student, Tiyo Attallah Salah-el. While serving a life sentence, Salah-el was involved in a range of programs and was a lively activist, scholar, and prison abolitionist. His ambitious goals for a 3-credit course include reading the complete works of William Shakespeare to discover if Shakespeare’s writing has “any relevance to today’s social, political, and cultural conditions.” This question remains an important and open-ended one in many prison education courses today.
8. Many of the prison education and arts programs that feature Shakespeare are offered in men’s prisons, not women’s. More often, women in prison receive vocational training as food service workers or seamstresses, positions that offset institutional costs while reinforcing caregiving as women’s primary aspirations. But what unique perspectives might an incarcerated woman bring to a character like Katherine or Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew (1632), a play that showcases violence against women as comic? How does our current prison industrial complex aspire to tame, silence, abuse, or erase women? While Shakespeare’s plays reinforce misogynistic notions of femininity and portray tactics for subduing women, might they also offer women inside the opportunity to critique such notions, tactics, and experiences?
9. Hamlet declares, “Denmark’s a prison” in Act 2, Scene 2 of Hamlet (1723). The presumed—but thwarted—heir to the throne, the character Hamlet openly questions the transfer of power in the state of Denmark to his corrupt uncle. Shakespeare’s play stages themes of guilt, revenge, mental health, and suspicion about who to trust, as Hamlet investigates his father’s murder and grapples with when and how to commit a murder himself. How might this play, staged inside prison, invite conversations about revenge, insufficient evidence, and state violence?
10. When is prison a useful metaphor for thinking about feelings of isolation and mistrust? What about our current prison system makes this metaphor sustainable across 400 years? After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees inside prison, Tiyo Attallah Salah-el led reading groups at the State Correctional Institution in Dallas, PA. In Questions for Students Who Are Reading Hamlet (2007) Salah-el remarks that the play, “sounds a lot like this prison” and invites readers to explore connections between Hamlet’s action and their own lived experiences as incarcerated men.
11. Shakespeare’s Othello (1881) weaves a story of treachery as the villain, Iago, spins false evidence to convince Othello that his beloved wife, Desdemona, is disloyal and cannot be trusted. In the scene displayed here, Othello demands that Iago “Give me the ocular proof” (Act 3, Scene 3). Iago fabricates evidence to intentionally mislead Othello. This play pursues how a system of power can manipulate what counts as evidence, particularly when that system is one of white supremacy.
12. A clipping from the Boston Globe (January 16, 1985) announces that the murder conviction of Frank “Parky” Grace was overturned due to false testimony. Grace, a Vietnam veteran and a founding member of the New Bedford Black Panthers Party, served 11 years of a life sentence at Walpole State Penitentiary in Massachusetts before he was released. Grace was harassed by New Bedford Police for his political affiliations, including over 40 arrests without conviction. Police also pressured key witnesses to present false testimony against him at his trial. What Shakespeare plays can you think of that pivot on false testimony?
13. Through the character Caliban, The Tempest (1801) invites questions about the incarceration and treatment of minority and enslaved populations. Described in the list of actors as a “deformed slave,” Caliban accuses the magician Prospero of a litany of abuses and mistreatments, including physical harm and labor exploitation. Above all, Caliban resents his oppressors for “learning me your language.” Why should incarcerated people be pressured to learn the language of Shakespeare? What if there were an equivalent tradition of teaching W.E.B Du Bois, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison in prisons today? To what extent is the power of a language also the power of racialist ideologies?
14. The impact of being inside prison has ripple effects that reach beyond prison walls. During his incarceration, Frank “Parky” Grace wrote letters to Gloria Xifaras Clark, an elementary school teacher and activist from New Bedford, Massachusetts. In this letter dated February 27, 1977, Grace describes the impact of his incarceration on his relationship with those outside, compares his working conditions to slavery, and recounts the various programs with which he is involved, including attending classes. This letter makes visible the inhumane conditions and harmful effects of incarceration on individuals, their families, and the communities that the prison industrial complex is designed to both perpetuate and hide.
15. Just this past summer, a Massachusetts state Judiciary Committee heard testimony for House Bill No. 1795 (2023). This Bill aims to establish a five-year moratorium on jail and prison construction in the state. Such a Bill, and the movement toward prison abolition more generally, invites future considerations of the relationship between education and mass incarceration. Advocates of the Bill hope that funding for prison construction will be allocated to the root causes of incarceration such as affordable housing, employment opportunities, and access to education. What would it look like if everyone had equal opportunities to earn a college degree and make a living wage? How might the citizens of Massachusetts enact policies that rewrite and resist the entwined histories of Shakespeare and Mass Incarceration?